Pop Quiz, Boys and Girls

Pop quiz, boys and girls. Get out your No. 2 pencils and get to work!

1.     The statement below is _______ true / ________false

The Vatican said Friday that Monsignor Jozef Wesolowski was found guilty by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in recent days, and sentenced to the harshest penalty possible against a cleric: laicization, meaning he can no longer perform priestly duties or present himself as a priest.

If you answered “true,” you got a zero on the quiz, but guess what? You’re also not alone. Here’s a sweet little description of “the harshest penalty possible against a cleric:”

Poor prisoners are called "ranas" or frogs. They sleep on the floor with mice and vermin around them. They have no private rooms or baths and they must use latrine-type holes in the jail patio and openly evacuate. These prisoners all shower together and fight for the last drop of water, while the goleta owners enjoy private baths. Every morning at about 9am there is a "conteo" or prisoner count where they are asked to walk out of the cells into the hallway to be counted.

Wesolowski was the papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and had the habit of strolling, beer in hand, the malecón and contracting the local boys to do you-know-what. And he was so open about it that the local news picked up on the story. Before he could be investigated and /or arrested, however, the archbishop of Santo Domingo went off to tell the pope that they had a little problem. The pope did what they always do: refused to turn the pedophile over to the civil authorities. Instead, for the last ten months, Wesolowski has been sitting in the Vatican, where he enjoys—or enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

So Wesolowski has two months to appeal the decision, and then faces a criminal trial in the Vatican. If convicted, he’ll be jailed there, presumably under conditions a bit more humane than the ones in Dominican Republic.

Isn’t it time to say it? The “state” of Vatican City is a joke—it not only is the smallest nation in the world, it also is just 108.7 acres, making it smaller than the average American farm. And I had assumed that the nationhood that everybody accords it was an ancient thing, from the times with the Vatican had real states. Wrong again—it dates from 1929.

OK, you say, so it’s bogus, but who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, for one thing, the Vatican denied the Dominican Republic’s extradition request, on the grounds that Wesolowski was a “citizen of Vatican City,” which has a policy of not extracting people.

There’s more. Allegations have been floating around the Internet that a common dodge for bishops is to give the files on abusive priests to the papal nuncio, since in several dioceses, victims of abuse have successfully sued to have the files made public.

And so Wesolowski may still have diplomatic immunity. What no one is saying is that he allegedly committed crimes, yes, in the Dominican Republic, but also here, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. And since the FBI, reportedly, is looking into the situation of priestly abuse, are they also looking at Wesolowski? Because Wesolowski made frequent trips to Puerto Rico, and stayed in the parish of a now defrocked priest, José Colón Otero. More, the parishioners were doing everything short of standing outside the church with cardboard placards, so desperate were they—the parishioners, not the placards—to get some church official to do something. They wrote to the bishop, then Wesolowski, and finally the Vatican. And what did Wesolowski do? Nothing.

There is something fishy going on in Arecibo. Consider the fact that the current bishop, Daniel Fernández Torres, is being investigated by the FBI for abuse. Oh, and he came out and said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had cleared him of the whole thing. But the lawyer representing the victim? She came out and said the Vatican never talked to her client.

Guys? It’s hard to know which is greater: the arrogance or the shamelessness.

Anybody Out There Got Twenty Grand?

On an island where the improbable happens more often than the probable, it made perfect sense: they were, after all, just across the street from Plaza las Américas (“the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean”, as it never stops telling us.) And everyone knows that Plaza has an excellent air conditioning system, with enough capacity to cool the place down to about thirty degrees in ten minutes. So why shouldn’t the 4000 members of the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER) just saunter over to the mall to have a little protest? They had, after all, just voted to strike.

To those who don’t know, UTIER is the union representing the workers who run the island’s power company. OK—so why are they striking? Because the legislature has voted and the governor has signed a budget that—while still 100 million dollars short—is being declared “balanced.”

Caveat—I’m swimming in two deep waters here, the first being Spanish, and the second being economics. In fact, “swimming” implies considerably more adeptness than I have: “struggling to tread water” is more like it. I can, however, use a calculator. But first, consider this statement:

La deuda del Estado Libre Asociado y sus corporaciones públicas alcanza la cifra de $71 billones de dólares, producto de décadas de decisiones que ponen primero los intereses de los acreedores. La deuda es tan grande que ya supera el tamaño de nuestra economía.*

(“The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its public agencies’ debt has reached the sum of 71 billion dollars, the product of decades of decisions which put the interest of the creditors first. The debt is so large that it now is greater than the size of our economy.”)*

OK—so we owe “71 billion”. And how many of us are there? Here’s your answer:

La población total de la isla bajó de unos 3,7 millones en 2010 a 3,6 millones en 2013. Las mayores bajas se registraron en San Juan y en el oeste y sur de la isla.

(“The population of Puerto Rico dropped from 3.7 million in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2013. The greatest drops were registered in San Juan and the west and south of the island.”)

So the question of the hour: how much would each of us—man, woman, child, infant—have to pay to pay off the debt tomorrow?

Well, let’s make it simple: let’s say that the debt is “only” 70 billion, and that the population has further dropped to 3.5 million. So how much is it?

Twenty thousand bucks.

Guys—would you buy a bond issued by a government so heavily in debt?

Well, if you said yes, you are considerably more rosy-eyed than the three companies who make it their business to advise investors about such things, since earlier in the year, all three of them reduced out bond ratings to junk status. And so we headed off from being La Isla del Encanto and became La Isla de la Deuda—and yes, that means what you think it means.

Enter the 242,000 people who are “working” for the government—and anyone who has tried to get service from our government knows haw richly justified those quotes are. The governor has promised to not cut jobs, but asked that the public unions make concessions about fringe benefits and payment for sick leave. The unions—reputedly—said yes, but wanted the governor to include language that would reinstate the benefits, once the crisis is over. This, the governor was unwilling to do.

And so, yesterday, the water utility and the power company decided to strike. OK, what have they vowed to do? Well, borrowing a page from the legislature, they’ve resolved to act in secret, as well as at night. Oh, and they’ve vowed to close off the airport, major shopping centers, and also Old San Juan. So what happens if my aging mother-in-law suffers a fall? Will we have to medevac her out?

Oh, and what is this going to do to our economy? Well, here’s one economist:

Una paralización en los servicios públicos como energía eléctrica, el agua, el Banco Gubernamental de Fomento y corporaciones públicas que ya están en situación económica y financiera delicada, esto le puede dar el golpe de muerte a las mismas”. 

(“A paralysis in public services such as power and light, the Government Development Bank and public corporations which now are in delicate economic and financial health could be the death blow for these agencies.”)

Absolutely possible, because what did the head of UTIER advise listeners to do, this morning on WKAQ Radio? Stop paying the light and the water bills!

The announcer stopped to scratch his head.

“OK—so what happens when they come to cut the service?”

Guess what? The answer should be obvious.

“Who’s going to come to cut your service? Not us!”

See? 

_____________

* The author of the first piece cited above uses the term “71 billion” the US way. In fact, the debt is named at 71,000 million dollars (which in Spanish would be termed 71 millardos and is 1,000 times less than 71 billion.)

No Trafficking in Mockery Today

OK—the good news first, since I have spent several hours looking for anything, anything that might resemble a ray of hope. So here it is: the five black-crowned night heron chicks that were felled from their tree are fine, despite one of them having a broken mandible, And you can see them—when they’re not sleeping, which I think shows a really sweet sensibility, don’t you?—right here.

Well, maybe you can see them there, since when I checked, I got a notification that “we’re working on the bird cam;” according to The New York Times, demand for the site was so great that it crashed.

It all started when the U.S. Postal Service in Oakland, California, decided to trim some ficus trees, since they were harboring some birds who were doing what birds do; that is, going to the bathroom and not going to the bathroom. So they went out and found some hapless Mexican guy, Ernesto Pulido, who started hacking away at the trees. And one of the hacks brought down the nest with the herons, which brought Cat Callaway and Lisa Owens Viani to the rescue. One of them recorded the whole thing on her cell phone; the other scooped up the birds and took them to an avian shelter.

The best thing? Well, you can argue that most of us know that birds build nests in the spring, and that once built, the logical thing to do is to raise chicks. So wouldn’t you expect a tree trimmer…?

But we may have to excuse Pulido, who was raised in Mexico, and says he loves animals. At any rate, he’s visited the center, spoken with the staff, and, well, here’s the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pulido, a Bay Point resident, offered to pay $2,700 toward the birds' care: the $2,200 he earned from the U.S. Postal Service for the tree-trimming job plus an additional $500. He's already paid the $500 and is awaiting payment from the post office to pay the rest, said International Bird Rescue spokesman Andrew Harmon.

But that wasn't enough for Pulido. He wanted to learn more about night herons, what the center does to save them, and what the public can do to help.

He was full of questions Thursday. What's the likelihood the injured birds will survive? How long can they live in a city? What's the difference between "endangered" and "protected"? 

And in a remarkable change of the bureaucratic heart, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service let him off the hook. So Pulido, who had been reviled a week ago, is now a hero! Nice, hunh? This kind of stuff happens out there in California.

Right, then it was time to turn to Idaho, since a couple out there have come up with a tremendous idea: repave the entire highway system with solar panels. Here, from Indiegogo, is a description of their project:

Solar Roadways is a modular paving system of solar panels that can withstand the heaviest of trucks (250,000 pounds). These Solar Road Panels can be installed on roads, parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, bike paths, playgrounds... literally any surface under the sun. They pay for themselves primarily through the generation of electricity, which can power homes and businesses connected via driveways and parking lots. A nationwide system could produce more clean renewable energy than a country uses as a whole (http://solarroadways.com/numbers.shtml). They have many other features as well, including: heating elements to stay snow/ice free, LEDs to make road lines and signage, and attached Cable Corridor to store and treat stormwater and provide a "home" for power and data cables. EVs will be able to charge with energy from the sun (instead of fossil fuels) from parking lots and driveways and after a roadway system is in place, mutual induction technology will allow for charging while driving. 

Son of a newspaper man that I am, I had to check this out, which was easily done by scrolling down the first page of the Google search on “solar roadways.” And yes, the 28-minute video debunking the solar roads was considerably less cool than the 7-minute video bunking (just did it to get a rise out of you, computer!) the idea. Certainly, there are significant costs to the project, and who knows if the idea is economically possible?

A more balanced view was offered by John Aziz, who pointed out that it’s easy to shoot down good ideas, but once in the while a crazy idea works. Want an example? Aziz points to the Wright brothers, and all the people who told them they were crazy. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:

In August 1901, after a difficult month testing their glider in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur Wright was inclined to give up. On the train back to Dayton, Ohio, he told his brother Orville that "not within a thousand years would man ever fly."

The Wright brothers' critics were hugely skeptical of them, too. After all, the notion that humans might take to the skies seemed fantastical and utopian at the time. Critics cried "Icarus!" European newspapers were derisive; a French one called the brothers "bluffeurs" (bluffers). 

Ouch—getting called a bluffeur by the French really hurts!

And as Aziz points out, we have the technology, which is more than the Wright brothers did. So reading Aziz made me remember Yeats, in his poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen:

Come let us mock at the great

That had such burdens on the mind

And toiled so hard and late

To leave some monument behind,

Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;

With all those calendars whereon

They fixed old aching eyes,

They never saw how seasons run,

And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good

That fancied goodness might be gay,

And sick of solitude

Might proclaim a holiday:

Wind shrieked -- and where are they?

Mock mockers after that

That would not lift a hand maybe

To help good, wise or great

To bar that foul storm out, for we

Traffic in mockery.

Well, some of the people who are not trafficking in mockery are those good folk up in Oregon, who decided to put together a far more manageable scheme to install solar panels on the side of a highway. During the day, sunlight is converted to electric power, which is sold to the electric company. At night, the electric company sells power to the road for its lights. Here, check this out from Oregon.gov ’s Office of Innovative Partnerships and Alternative Funding (sigh—if Oregon were a man, I’d marry him….):

In December 19, 2008, the nation’s first solar highway project started feeding clean, renewable energy into the electricity grid, and the Oregon Solar Highway has been operating seamlessly ever since. The 104 kilowatt (dc) ground-mounted solar array, made up of 594 solar panels, is situated at the interchange of Interstate 5 and Interstate 205 south of Portland, Oregon, and offsets over one-third of the energy needed for freeway illumination at the site.

There’s something else as well, because have you ever been to Oregon? I have, and my umbrella rotted after three days. In fact, I’ve seen more sun in London than I have in Portland. So how much energy could we generate, down here, in sunny Puerto Rico, if every house had solar panels powering the power company while we worked, and that power company powered us while we watched TV and slept? Oh, and even if we just reduced our electric bill by just a third, well, raise your hands, out there, all of you against the idea?

“Can we do that,” I asked my friend Tony, when we were talking about the idea.

And the next question?

“Well, why not?”

I don’t remember the answer, all I remember was thinking that it was the old story: something like ‘we can’t do it because we’ve never done it so we’ve all found a way to make money on one scheme, why should we find a way to save money on a new scheme?’

Something else to consider—the sun is not the only thing out there. Try standing, as I did for seven years, at a bus stop next to a highway, in this case road number one north of Caguas, Puerto Rico. News flash to you guys out there—it’s hard even to talk on your cell phone, the noise from the roar of the air pushed aside by the trucks hurling past is near to deafening. So here—from five long years ago—is The New York Times on combining solar and wind power next to our highways:

Auction documents suggest that each 10-mile stretch of the Green Roadway system could generate enough energy to power up to 2,000 homes. The installed cost would be about $2.6 million for the solar components and $4.2 million for wind, but up to 65 percent could be knocked off if federal, state and local subsidies and tax credits are factored in, the documents suggest. 

You know, we could have done this years ago, but we didn’t. So now we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan, blowing the local population away, and the rest of the world hates us. Grrrrr….

Oh well, at least the herons are OK….

Doña Georgina Bids Farewell

Right, so I had some really important things to say about the situation in the Muslim world, since I had spent the weekend busily figuring out what was wrong with the 1.2 or 1.4—don’t remember and don’t care—billion people who practice the religion.

And what’s wrong, you ask? Well, according to the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji, the problem with Islam is the Muslims, who…

…but wait, let Manji speak for herself, since—as someone once said of Rachel Maddow—she couldn’t look stupid if she spend a month trying. Click on the clip below. Oh, and by the way, better have the fire extinguisher handy, ‘cause those sparks really fly….

Right, then I had to worry about “Islam—A Religion of Peace or Violence?.” So there Christopher Hitchens was—do I have to tell what side he was taking?—butting heads with Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The problem? Hitchens I understood completely, but Ramadan? Well, I guess you gotta be religious to get it….

So that meant that I had to watch a documentary about Islam, during which I learned that the only reason we have this thing is that Mohammed spent 22 years going into trances, much of the time alone in a cave. He then came down and dictated the whole thing to his buddies, all illiterate, so what did they do? They memorized it, and then, a couple decades after the death of Mohammed, the third Caliph—or somebody or other—decided it should be written down. So there was a great to-do, and versions were checked against each other, and there had to be two eyewitnesses, and now we have the Koran, WHICH IS THE ABSOLUTE AND FINAL WORD OF GOD. See?

In fact, so immersed was I in the Muslim world that I had gone into the website of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), since Manji had mentioned that the imams, contrary to what one sheik averred, had not been quick to denounce the September 11 attacks: they had to be pressured into it. And since the sheik, Ibrahim Mogra, was connected to the MCB, it was definitely time to look into that. Oh, and the MCB describes itself thus, on its website:

The Muslim Council of Britain is one of the UK's largest and most diverse Muslim umbrella organisation with over 500 affiliated national, regional and local organisations, mosques, charities and schools.   

There is, of course, nothing about the Nigerian group Boko Haram, which abducted close to three hundred schoolgirls over a month ago. But I did find this ringing denunciation, which all of you out there should take to heart:

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns in the strongest terms the act of violating a place of worship by the recently formed extreme far right, anti-Muslim group, Britain First. The most recent incident occurred at midday yesterday, where the emboldened action by three middle aged men and woman entered one of the largest Islamic institutions in the country, wearing their shoes and trampling on prayer surfaces to carry out their misguided propaganda. This has left many members of the community angered and disappointed with the inability of the government and the authorities to curtail this type of thuggish behaviour.

Guys? You really shouldn’t make it so easy….

OK—it’s clear, I realized, that these girls are never going to see their families again, and why not? Because the Muslim world either doesn’t want to or is too craven to speak up.

OK—so what about men? What would happen if all of the world’s men—except for the 1.2-billion-divided-by-two Muslims—stood up and said that real men didn’t do this to their daughters, their wives, or their mothers.

Well, when the going gets tough, Marc makes a tee shirt, so here it is:

Pretty cool, hunh? Wow, that would put the fear of Allah into those bastards!

So I was scratching a hole quite deeply into my head thinking about all this, when Mr. Fernández called, proposing a trip to the beach. And I realized: a trip to the beach would do more for me than I could do for the 300 schoolgirls, or even the 1.2 billion Muslims. So off we went.

And I’ve woken up, today, to the startling news that our local power company didn’t have the money, last Friday, to buy fuel to make electricity? Why? Because the Justice Department raided the purchasing department on Friday, seizing records and looking for irregularities. And then the banks got nervous and revoked the line of credit. So that meant that they had to scamper around and transfer 60 million bucks to pay off the debt. Oh, and here’s more interesting news:

“Claro que no les podemos pagar a los suplidores, si entre el gobierno y las corporaciones públicas nos debe casi $300 millones”, manifestó el ambientalista. “La misma gente que anda criticando la Autoridad es la que la ha llevado a la quiebra”.

(“Of course we can’t pay our suppliers, when the government and the public corporations owe us almost $300 million,” stated the environmentalist. “The same people who are running around criticizing the Authority are those who have brought it to bankruptcy.”)

‘It’s too much,’ I think. ‘I absolutely cannot be responsible for 1.2 billion people who are driving all the rest of us crazy because they believe something dreamed up in a cave in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t be responsible for the power company, which didn’t have the money to buy fuel, despite the fact that the electric bill comes in at 400$ a month, and anyway, it’s the start of the week, and if I’m feeling this way today, how am I going to be on Friday?’

So I turn the page and get this:

Yup, Puerto Rico strikes again! Because one of our zany habits, much beloved by some, sniffed at by the humorless, is to have wakes—called in Spanish velorios—with the dead displayed in various and characteristic positions. And this charming lady—who had wanted to be waked wearing skates, but settled for her wedding dress instead—is doña Georgina Chevroni Lloren; the funeral was yesterday,

It all started with El Para’o, or the standing one, who had bragged to his enemies that they would never see him lying down. So what did he do—OK, what did he instruct be done—after he got eleven bullets shot into him? Take a look!

This image, by the way, I lifted from an article called “Dead Men Standing….”

That’s when it hit me, since we had joked about all this in those days when I was pretending to teach English at Wal-Mart.

“Yes, I intend to be waked in this very room,” I would assure the students, “in fact, in this very chair!”

“You do, Marc?” The students would lean in and peer into my eyes.

“Absolutely, I intend to die with my boots still firmly planted in the fertile fields of Wal-Mart! Others may retire, but mine is a passion, not merely a career. I may very well die in this room, but if not, I’ll certainly be waked in this room! And one day, however many decades it will be, you’ll walk in and see me….”

Here I would raise my hand with my index finger pointed to the board, and then…

…freeze!

Ahh, readers, life had other plans—it so often does. So what to do?

I run over to the other shop, where Lady is busy blow-drying a casita, and sit patiently, thinking, as I wait—shouldn’t I be doing something serious? Doesn’t the Great American Novel still wait to be born? Would Hemingway or Tolstoy have wasted his time this way?

At last the house is dry, packed, and given to the tourists—it’s time to show Lady the print edition of El Nuevo Día.

“Just in the event, “ I start, and Lady gets it immediately. She begins slapping my knees with the paper, and then puts it over her head as she roars with laughter.

“It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in Puerto Rico,” I tell Lady, who has just told me that Georgina has gone viral; she’s sitting all over the web.

“You think it’s true that García Márquez said ‘they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico?’” I ask Lady. I’ve looked it up a thousand times….

Lady pauses, and then comes up the answer…

“…well, it’s either true or it should be true….”

Good enough for me!  

Naïa Gets an Uncle

Contrary to the calumnies darting from the vicious tongues of asps and vipers, it was never about a slice of pizza.

Naïa, you see, the 12-year-old daughter of Lady and Nico, the owners of the café which I frequent (it’s sort of a stretch to say “where I work”), had offered me a piece of pizza, at the instigation—I later found out—of her mother. “Make sure Marc gets a piece,” said Lady, before tearing off a ten-dollar bill from the wad in her purse. Naïa, fortunately, is still a few steps away from adolescence, so rather than argue, pout, flare, or stalk away, she popped across the gift shop and into the café to offer me the pizza.

“You are now officially my niece,” I told her, on the way to the pizza. She was with Stephen, her tutor, and the two were busy cramming useless information in her head, so that she could take a test before forgetting it all. Remember that?

So I returned to writing what I was writing, and she returned to renting brain space to geography, or whatever The World and Its People is about. Then Lady arrived, and I told her I had adopted Naïa as my niece.

“Wonderful,” said Lady

“Not really,” I said. “I intend to be a completely cranky and querulous uncle. Very exigent. Oh, and she’ll have to take care of me in my declining years….”

So Lady went off to consult with Naïa about all that, and then came back with the news: I had just said what I did because of the offer of pizza.

“That is absolutely untrue,” I erupted. “Dammit, when are people going to stop assuming that random events are causal? I’ve been very seriously pondering adopting Naïa for some time now.”

At this point, Naïa was doing a spelling test—one of the words, by the way, was “serendipity” and that’s a word for a 12-year old?—so I decided to tackle it later, though I did wonder whether putative niecehood (well, computer, what’s YOUR suggestion? It’s bitch, bitch, bitch all day from you!) wasn’t more important than spelling.

I went back to considering the topic of family, since it’s been different, often, for gay people. More than most people, we’ve tended to form our own, informal families, especially in those days when coming out to parents and siblings was impossible, or very difficult.

It was a long time ago, and we’ve all gotten over it, but for some of us it’s happening still, and will never stop. But twenty-five years ago, the phone would ring, there would be silence when I answered, and then a click.

“Your mom called,” I would tell Raf. Eventually, he confronted her: “Mami, Marc knows perfectly well that it’s you…”

There were other things: Raf was barred from seeing his nephew, who was probably four or five at the time. And when we moved to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t welcome in the house.  And so, on one of those early Christmas Eves, I found myself alone in the house: Raf had gone home to his parents, and the other people living in the building were gone as well.

It was a particularly beautiful night, with a gentle fog, and the streets were deserted, hushed. Everybody, it seemed, had gone home to family; in a few hours time, everybody would rush back in to the old city, and the partying would start. But now, it was just me, alone in an empty house.

And then, far away, I heard music approaching, and realized that it was that loveliest of traditions—a group of neighbors gathering with guitars and güiros, walking the streets and singing the old-fashioned Puerto Rican carols, called villancicos or aguinaldos.

Let me explain, this was not the traditional parranda, or maybe, in fact, it was. Because the usual parranda tends to take place a 2 AM, when you are dead asleep, and your friends? Dead drunk!

They then gather outside your house and make enough noise—ostensibly called singing—to rouse you. They then shout “¡ASALTO!”—assault, which is almost literally true. You then have to start making the asopao—a rice and chicken stew, and very tasty—while your “guests” raid your liquor cabinet. The only good thing about it? You can retaliate the next night, when they’ll really be groggy.

But there was none of this about the group singing carols; it was before nine PM, the group was singing almost under their breath, and exchanging greetings with whatever passerby was on the street. Really, the carols seemed part of the fog, and the fog seemed part of a past: a gentle, sweet past that would disappear at any moment. It was spectral.

I stood by the window and listened. And felt, of course, anguishingly alone. I considered going out to join them, but couldn’t—I didn’t speak Spanish.

It feels disloyal even to remember this, much less write about it. Why? Well, I was playing my Bach suites yesterday in the café, next to Naïa; Lady and Craig joined us.

“You know, Naïa, I was utterly serious about being an uncle, which is definitely not good for you, since I’m generally wretched at the business. In fact, we should probably start right now….”

I then put on my crotchety English accent and begin the harangue:

“Naïa, fetch me my shawl. No, not THAT shawl, the other one! How many times do I have to tell you, I never use that shawl at home, only for the opera. And my tea, Naïa, where is my tea? You know that I always have tea with my shawl! Naïa, the tea is too hot. Now it’s too cold!”

Naïa, of course, is completely ignoring me, but that’s fine, because I know what to do about that.

“Naïa, are you ignoring me?”

“I think she is,” I tell her mother. “She completely doesn’t believe I’m serious in my avuncular (you knew that was coming, right?) intentions. Maybe what I should do is write about it, since this blog has an international readership, and people will want to know.”

“That would be good,” said Lady.

“Or we could have a pizza party,” I said.

So I played some Bach, and was just finishing up, when Ilia, Raf’s mother, came strolling in. Well, strolling isn’t quite the term, since both she and Quique, Raf’s father, are now using walkers. So let’s say they came walkering in….

“I can’t stay,” she told me, “because Quique doesn’t want to….”

Quique gives me the half-embrace that guys give each other in Puerto Rico and, surprisingly, sits down. I begin the G major suite and wonder when they will drift off.

They don’t.

So I finish the suite—that’s twenty minutes of Bach—and turn to Ilia.

“Wonderful,” she says, “why don’t you make a recording?”

Then I remember Naïa, still sitting next to me, still absorbed in her iPad.

“Do you know that you have a new granddaughter?” I ask Ilia.

“I had no idea,” she said.

So it was time to get Naïa’s attention, which is done by waving a hand in front of the iPad—the ear buds seem to be an essential part of Naïa’s anatomy.

“You really should meet your new grandparents,” I tell her, and Ilia responds in form.

“Ay, ¡qué linda!”

(For a boy, it’s “¡ay, que guapo!”)

My new niece smiles and waves at her grandmother and returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the iPad.

‘Family,’ I think, ‘gets more important as you get older. When you’re a kid, it’s commonplace and almost annoying. But at Ilia’s age? Wow….”

‘How long will we have them?’ I think. ‘Because it’s precious to have new people come into your life, like Naïa. But it’s ripping everybody apart, knowing that Ilia and Quique… Well, there will be a day…”

‘We’ve all moved on,’ I think. ‘Now I get in trouble if I skip going to family affairs. Can’t win, can you?’

Ah, but I have!

Famous in Cyprus

“Never a dull moment,” said Lady, looking up from painting her houses. We were sitting in her other store, Mi Pequeño San Juan. I was there, since there had been a mini-hurricane the night before; the water had backed up in the street, to such an extent that the pipes draining the roofs became vents for the street water. So the Poet’s Passage now has a swimming pool on the roof. What doesn’t it have?

Electricity.

OK—so Stephan and Naïa, tutor and tutee respectively, had moved to the front window, where there was sufficient light. I speak briefly to Zorba, Lady’s brother, who lives above the café and, now, under the swimming pool. He was up from one to five in the morning, coping with the situation.

It’s odd, the stuff that happens in the tropics that never seems to happen anywhere else. Where else does it rain so hard that the street water backs up the drains and floods the roofs? Or consider what Zorba reported:

“The transformers began exploding so bad it sounded like a war zone….”

Well, it’s been an improbable week, starting on Saturday, when a woman came into the café, eager to meet Lady, who is a poet as well as house painter. Lady had left a few minutes before to go to the movies with Naïa, and the woman was crestfallen. So she fell back on second best: me.

“I’m from Cyprus, but I’m here for a convention of chiropractors,” she said. So we chatted; she’s a music teacher and a poet, but not, it turned out, a chiropractor. That’s her husband.

“Hey, Marc, did you know I’m famous in Cyprus?” said Lady casually, a couple days later.

“What?”

“Yeah, there was this lady hanging around the café, and she couldn’t wait to meet me. Elizabeth kept calling me, asking when I was going to get there.”

Elizabeth being the manager of the gift shop….

“So she says everybody in Cyprus—well, everybody who reads poetry, that is—knows me and reads me. And when they heard she was going to Puerto Rico, they all got jealous and told her she HAD to meet me. Who knew? I’m famous in Cyprus!”

“Wow!”

“So then she asked, would I be willing to go to Cyprus, to give a lecture? So I told her: two first class tickets, and a week’s stay in a hotel. You wanna go?”

This is, of course, improbable.

As was my reaction, several hours later.

It was Monday, you see, and I had woken late, and was out of sorts. And then I had gone to the café, which now has air conditioning (after a couple months without), but Internet? It had checked out several days before.

All of that created a peculiarly excellent agar for a petri dish overflowing with….

A.   Envy

B.    Resentment

C.    Self-Pity

D.   Annoyance

E.     All of the above, and by the way? This is the answer….

Why, I raged, should Lady get to be famous in Cyprus when I have written what the six people who have read Iguanas say is a great, a wonderful, a landmark book, destined to blaze brightly against the literary skies of not just Wisconsin, not the United States, but verily, the entire world—and assuredly the whole of the solar system. What was so special about her? What about me? Sure, she’s been at it for twenty years, and I only drifted in the door—and the back door at that—a couple years ago, but WHAT ABOUT ME! At this point, I am raging in circles in the living room.

“Dammit, people love her poetry so much, they’ve even tattooed it on themselves! Remember that lady who came into the coffee shop and peeled her shirt down? And there it was—still red and glistening: Little by Little. Dammit, and then Lady has to sit down and remark that it’s the SECOND time someone has tattooed her poetry on themselves. Dammit!”

The cats scatter….

I stormed up the street, and tore into her shop.

“I just want you to know,” I said meanly, “that if the entire ISLAND of Cyprus came outside and begged me to be famous there, I WOULD SAY NO!!!”

“Marc?”

Well, I thought of Franny, who had once remarked, “well, we’re just going to have to meet at my current level of immaturity….” She had been playing a board game with Tyler, her 10-year old grandson, and there was a dispute about the rules. He dug his heels in, she dug her heels in, and if Jeanne hadn’t dragged Franny off by the ears to the kitchen, they’d still be at it.

“Well, I would,” I said defensively, and then turned to go.

Lady knows—sometimes words don’t help things; she hugs me instead.

“Hey, Marc, you see that lady over there?”

It’s the next morning, and yes, I had seen the lady, and had noted that she was cachectic—a fancy way of saying that she was looking only slightly better than your average concentration camp victim.

“She’s only got twenty days to live—that’s what her husband told me. He called and asked if it would be OK if they came from Portland and spent her last days in the café. See? Her whole family is there….”

It comes back to me—those days of waiting for the end, of holding on and letting go, of having your love torn out of you, wrenched away, of screaming silently and going away to wail in the woods and coming back and coping again until the next time you had to vent it.

There’s something else as well, something almost unbearable to say: you want your loved one to die.

Not all of you, not even most of you. But there is a part of you saying, “if it has to be—and I know perfectly well that it does—then for God’s sake GET IT OVER WITH! Because I cannot stand this pain, and it’s doing her no good at all anyway….”

You’re living with every last nerve ending firing standing next to a volcano in a hurricane. Oh, and did I mention the earthquake? In these moments, you are as close to the life source as you will ever be.

And they had come to Lady’s café? At such a moment?

OK, I decide.

She can be famous in Cyprus….